# DBLP: Phase-Aware Bounded-Loss Transport for Burst-Resilient Distributed ML Training

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.01989 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.01989/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 20 of its 40 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 May 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
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- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11946/) (2019)
- [Pointer Sentinel Mixture Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.07843/) (2016)
- [Megatron-LM: Training Multi-Billion Parameter Language Models Using Model Parallelism](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.08053/) (2019)
- [GShard: Scaling Giant Models with Conditional Computation and Automatic Sharding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.16668/) (2020)
- [DeepSeek-VL: Towards Real-World Vision-Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05525/) (2024)
- [Deep Gradient Compression: Reducing the Communication Bandwidth for Distributed Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.01887/) (2017)
- [PowerSGD: Practical Low-Rank Gradient Compression for Distributed Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.13727/) (2019)
- [Gradient Descent Happens in a Tiny Subspace](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04754/) (2018)
- [Gradient Sparsification for Communication-Efficient Distributed Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.09854/) (2017)
- [On the Relation Between the Sharpest Directions of DNN Loss and the SGD Step Length](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.05031/) (2018)
- [Critical Learning Periods in Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.08856/) (2017)
- [Poseidon: An Efficient Communication Architecture for Distributed Deep Learning on GPU Clusters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03292/) (2017)
- [Comet: Fine-grained Computation-communication Overlapping for Mixture-of-Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.19811/) (2025)
- [Priority-based Parameter Propagation for Distributed DNN Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.03960/) (2019)
- [Accordion: Adaptive Gradient Communication via Critical Learning Regime Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.16248/) (2020)
- [OptiReduce: Resilient and Tail-Optimal AllReduce for Distributed Deep Learning in the Cloud](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06993/) (2023)
- [MixNet: A Runtime Reconfigurable Optical-Electrical Fabric for Distributed Mixture-of-Experts Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.03905/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Distributed machine learning (ML) training has become a necessity with the prevalence of billion to trillion-parameter-scale models. While prior work has improved training efficiency from the ML perspective at the application layer, it often fails to address transient congestion events at the network layer that introduce severe tail latency and training-time variability, thereby undermining the quality of service of distributed ML training systems. Existing network optimizations treat all gradients equally and thus fail to integrate sufficient model-training insights into communication protocol design. In this paper, we present Dynamic Bounded-Loss Protocol (DBLP), a burst-resilient, training-phase-aware, and hardware-agnostic transport protocol that incorporates model-level tolerance properties into gradient communication. By dynamically adjusting gradient loss tolerance across training phases, DBLP reduces overall training time and mitigates tail-latency collapse during transient high-loss events (i.e., microbursts). Compared to the current state-of-the-art solution (baseline), DBLP tolerates significantly higher loss while achieving comparable test accuracy, and reduces end-to-end training time by an average of 24.4% and a maximum of 33.9%. At microburst events, DBLP achieves up to 5.88x single-round communication latency speedups over the baseline, preventing burst-induced tail-latency spikes and maintaining stable training performance.